By Tony Abbott -
In the aftermath of Kirill Kaprizov turning down the largest contract in NHL history from the Minnesota Wild, fans in the State of Hockey are now facing the unthinkable: A Wild team without their franchise's only superstar.
With this news cycle being raw, the big questions are, Will this get done? or What do the Wild do with Kaprizov? But lost in that discourse is a bigger question.
What even ARE the Wild without Kaprizov?
The easiest answer is that they go back to where the franchise was before: Irrelevant to the NHL landscape. We got a sneak preview of it for half of last season. The Wild were 21-17-3 in games without Kaprizov, which would have put them on a 90-point pace that would have kept them out of the playoff bubble.
If that repeated itself next year, the Wild would not just not make the playoffs, but finish well out of the Draft Lottery range. In that case, re-loading with Gavin McKenna would be a long shot.
The timing of losing Kaprizov would be devastating. The Wild are finally entering their contention window and are built to win in the next three years. Past that time, veterans like Jonas Brodin, Jared Spurgeon, Marcus Foligno, and perhaps even Joel Eriksson Ek may age out of being real pieces of a contending team. Meanwhile, players currently on cheap contracts -- Zeev Buium, Danila Yurov, David Jiříček, and Liam Öhgren -- should see their salaries skyrocket.
We can be pretty sure that Minnesota's ambitions to win won't slow down, even with Kaprizov gone. General manager Bill Guerin spent four years taking a step back to try moving forward with the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts. He won't want to keep going backwards, and maybe can't afford to do so.
So, assuming the Wild forge ahead, Guerin will build this team around their next-best player. For now, Matt Boldy is the favorite to hold that title, who is at an interesting crossroads in his career. On The Athletic's recent NHL Player Tiers list -- a ranking heavily influenced by members of NHL coaching staffs and front offices -- Boldy landed at the top of Tier 3. He's at the exact dividing line between "NHL All-Star" and "Franchise Player."
To give some context to what that actually means, the three forwards above him in Tier 2C are William Nylander, Artemi Panarin, and Sam Reinhart, and the three below him in 3A are Jake Guentzel, Brandon Hagel, and Seth Jarvis. You can build an offense around the 2C guys, probably not so much with the 3A.
Whether Boldy can move up into that Franchise tier, we'll save for another day. But if he does, he's on par with Panarin and Sebastian Aho, who are the best forwards on the New York Rangers and Carolina Hurricanes, respectively.
Zeev Buium is the only other major contender for the Wild's top player. The rookie defenseman is a consensus top-10 prospect and enters the season as a leading candidate for the Calder Trophy. Should he win it, he'd join Kaprizov as the only two in Wild history to win a major player award.
That'd only be the beginning of overtaking Boldy as the focal point of a Kaprizov-less team, though. When we look at the top defensemen in the league -- Cale Makar (Tier 1A), Quinn Hughes (1B), Rasmus Dahlin (2A), Miro Heiskanen (2A), Zach Werenski (2B), Evan Bouchard (2C), and Adam Fox (2C) -- all but Werenski were putting up 70-plus point seasons by their third full season. If that's Buium by Year 3, then we're talking about him being in a similar tier.
Unfortunately, if either Boldy or Buium takes that leap without the other, it's not a great recipe for success. The Wild spent the past five seasons being a team built around a better winger than Boldy, and it's only given them four playoff appearances, all lost in the first round.
The Ottawa Senators had the best defenseman on the planet in 2016-17 with Erik Karlsson, and he and Mark Stone (a decent analogue for current-day Boldy) could only drag a ho-hum to the Eastern Conference Finals, losing to Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin's Pittsburgh Penguins.
But the two of them hitting that franchise player-type level? We can see some examples of consistent success.
The New York Rangers have spent the past four seasons with Panarin and Fox, and those two, being their best players (along with elite goalie Igor Shesterkin), were able to reach the Eastern Conference Finals twice in three years before falling off last season. If Filip Gustavsson can continue to deliver the kind of numbers he did last year (.914 in the regular season), Boldy and Buium could give Minnesota a similar team dynamic.
But the ideal scenario for the Wild would be duplicating something like what the Dallas Stars have going on. They have two franchise players, at both forward (Mikko Rantanen, Tier 2B) and defense (Heiskanen, 2A), backed up by a young, gifted supporting cast. Thomas Harley (3A), Jason Robertson (3A), Jake Oettinger (3C), Wyatt Johnston (4A), and Roope Hintz (4B) are all between the ages of 22 and 28.
Minnesota can do this if a lot of things go right. Brock Faber (4B) is a player who can be part of a core like Dallas has, but players like Marco Rossi, Jesper Wallstedt, Yurov, Jiříček, and Öhgren have work to do before getting to that level. And still, the team has no chance of replicating Dallas' model if Boldy and Buium can't get to being franchise-type players.
But without that Tier 1 player in Kaprizov's, what's that team's ceiling? The Stars have had a lot of success in the past two seasons. They made the Conference Finals both years, which beats the Wild for their franchise's history. However, they were thwarted in six games both times. Maybe the Stars will break through. Still, until that happens, it's hard to ignore the fact that they don't have an MVP-type player at the top of their lineup.
Until the Wild trade him, Minnesota does. And all of the things we laid out about the team are true if Kaprizov stays in Minnesota. A lot would have to go right for the Wild to hit that championship level, of course. However, Kaprizov's presence gives them a hell of a head start, and losing him means the team's margin for error drops to zero. There may be life without Kaprizov, but losing him will be devastating to the team's ceiling, no matter what else breaks Minnesota's way.
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